Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death

Source:
Fresh Air
NPR
February 21, 2013

Today on NPR's "Fresh Air", Terry Gross interviewed Dr. Sam Parnia M.D., one of the world's leading experts on the scientific study of death,
the human mind-brain relationship, and near-death experiences.

"What happens when we die? Wouldn't we all like to know?
We can't bring people back from the dead to tell us -- but, in some cases,
we almost can.
Resuscitation medicine is now sometimes capable of reviving people after their heart has stopped beating and their brain has flat-lined.
Dr. Sam Parina, a critical care doctor and director of resuscitation research at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine, studies what these people experience
in that period after their heart stops and before they're resuscitated.
This includes visions such as bright lights and out-of-body experiences."

"What we study are not people who are near death," Parina tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "We study people who have objectively died...And therefore what we've understood is that the experience that these people have of going beyond the threshold of death, entering the period after death for the first few tens of minutes
or hours of time, provides us with an indication of what we're all likely to experience when we go through death."